Saturday, March 4, 2017

Demographic Change, It's A Comin'

Northern Ireland's snap election has left the rival extremes of
politics virtually neck and neck for the first time — and facing a
bruising battle to put their Catholic-Protestant government back
together again in an increasingly polarized landscape.

The big winner from Saturday's final results to fill the
Northern Ireland Assembly is the Irish nationalist party that triggered
the vote, Sinn Fein.

Already the major voice for the Catholic side, Sinn Fein
reduced its previous 10-seat gap with its erstwhile Protestant
colleagues in government to a single seat in a 90-member chamber. Sinn
Fein came within 1,168 votes province-wide of becoming the most popular
party for the first time in a corner of the United Kingdom that its
leaders long sought to make ungovernable through Irish Republican Army
carnage....

In another first, the leading British Protestant party, the
Democratic Unionists, won't have enough votes to block legislation on
its own, a power long employed to block gay rights legislation backed by
all other parties. Never before has the Protestant side's status as the
in-built majority in Northern Ireland felt so precarious.

The outcome from Thursday's election, forced by a surprise Sinn
Fein withdrawal that collapsed the previous unity government, caught
other parties off guard. The Democratic Unionists finished with 28
seats, Sinn Fein 27. The political affiliations of smaller parties meant
the new assembly will have 40 unionists committed to keeping Northern
Ireland in the United Kingdom versus 39 nationalists seeking to merge
the once Protestant-dominated north into the Republic of Ireland.

I am curious if Brexit was a large motivating factor in more people supporting Sinn Fein in this election than in previous elections. The Unionist side is getting very old, and I would guess that some young Protestants see more of a future with Ireland and the EU than with Britain. Previous elections showed a much slower rate of change in relative strength between Unionists and Nationalists.